I will not apologize for loving babies. I will not apologize for standing up for the little ones who cannot speak for themselves. I don't not apologize for believing Life is a gift regardless who gave it be it God or Sponteneous Chemical Reactions. Why should I deprive another human something I will not forsake myself?

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"You want to know who just loves abortions? God loves abortions. He performs them all the time and not even for the money. " NoGodsForMe

"I wish it was men who got pregnant b/c we would squirt out these babies and go about our business. We don't have be divas on this stuff." DrTesla

It is not a War on Women to oppose abortion it is a war to save women as 50 percent of aborted babies are female. Ending a tiny female's life, crushing it and causes extreme pain, is a horror of horrors that I shall not abide without vocal protest.

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"You want to know who just loves abortions? God loves abortions. He performs them all the time and not even for the money. " NoGodsForMe

"I wish it was men who got pregnant b/c we would squirt out these babies and go about our business. We don't have be divas on this stuff." DrTesla

I realize I've missed bit here, but are you one of those 'when the sperm meets the egg' = fully realized human being types?

Apparently so.

However, I don't see much of a proposal to help ensure that (sperm+egg) have the necessary resources to attain that full realization of their potential. It's easy to stand in front of a clinic and yell vile things at women who have chosen to terminate a pregnancy, especially when you're in the company of a dozen like-minded zealots from your church. Not so easy to really walk the walk.

I say we start taxing churches, and redirect that money specifically to quality education, eradication of poverty, realistic sex education classes, safe and affordable housing, and free birth control -- All of which would improve society and reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.

You are a redneck blowhard, bro. I can see you being a blue collar union factory worker.

ObamaCare doesn't seem to be going too well. They can't get their stupid website to work. Most everybody's premiums have skyrocketed and many people are losing their plans as a result of the law despite Obama's consistent promise people could keep their company plans if they liked them. Other peeople are losing their jobs or being reduced to part time as a result of the law. Free healthcare isn't a right. The main reason you work is to pay for your healthcare costs and your food and shelter. You are basically sayig people have the right to other people's money which seems like a violation of private property rights and wealth redistribution. You cry about the commi label but then you advocate Karl Marx.

Poor people are already eligible for numerous government programs to help them that we have paid for with our taxes. We are overtaxed, so if the poor are not being supported with our tax dollars that is on the politicians who are throwing it at the special interest groups like unions to secure their votes. Obama's admin has thrown millions of dollars at solar power compnanuies who have since gone bankrupt because that isn't a profitable market. We are subsidizing corporate failures yet you claim we haven't paid taxes to support the poor. lol

Nothing stops you and other leftwingers from paying more taxes if you think the government deserves more money. Pretty sure you don't do that and in fact you look for tax breaks and take them to save as much money as possible. So you are hypocrite on the tax issue.

You are justing trying to make abortion issue about anything other than the abortion issue. Is it life. Should we terminate life simply because it is an inconvenience for the parents? All you are doing is trying to rationalize abortin but the solution to problems is not kill babies if they are alive. Civilized peoples understand this concept.

Boom. I Am Legend.

Sorry, I'm not a factory worker. Never have been. I was a small business owner for 20 years. I had to quit because certain idiots on wall street and in investment firms destroyed the new house market and I was suddenly without work. But that's okay, at least I was born.

P.S. I was a lousy businessman. I did great work, but I hated charging people money for what I did. I felt sorry for them. Even the billionaires I worked for. So at least my commie attitude benefitted some. I charged folks, sure, but never as much as my competition. Not that I and much. I was too good.

And I did my own taxes, and I was too scared to take too many tax breaks. I could have done better, I'm sure. But when Bush was president, especially, I didn't know how many other stupid asses were in government and I just didn't take any chances.

You should know that the story about Obamacare causing people to loose their insurance is false. Well, I sort of have to depend on news sources for that report, as do you, and hence we have no idea which is true. But at least there is a possibility that it is false. The lady who went on Fox and said she was loosing her health insurance later admitted she got a better deal through Obamacare. But for some reason Fox hasn't reported that, from what I understand. I wouldn't know. I have never figured out how to watch TV and puke at the same time, so I never turn on Fox. Also, I've only owned a TV three months of my adult life and I almost died of boredom. So I am even less inclined to watch useless stuff than the average person.

Anyway, my issue with the right and abortion is this. The right seems to think that each and every single person in this country has the opportunity to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and if they don't, tough. That's their choice. We'll ignore little debilitating factors, like poverty, crime, abuse, crap-assed educations (thanks for serving as an example of that, by the way) and other problems that are really hard to overcome tend to stand in the way of success. Toss in a system that has failure built into it specifically so that the economy will always have a plentiful supply of low-wage workers, and things just plain suck.

Now the anti-abortion people I know seem to think that every single woman who gets an abortion simply considers the procedure a form of birth control. However, that is not the case. Yes, I'm sure some women are a bit to cavalier about the whole thing, but many an abortion come about because the mother-to-be can't figure out any way to afford the expense of a child. And if you're thinking she should have just stayed away from sex, that would further confirm that you don't have any idea what it is like to be human. For some women, they are already living amidst poverty, and they feel they have no choice. In other cases, the women are not yet impoverished, but they know they will be if they have a child.

Welfare only pays out for two years, maximum. I think that's accurate. It might be three. Granted, you hate that, you think it should be a lot longer, but some dorky Democrat stopped welfare from being a lifetime benefit and pretty much shut down the system. Clinton was his name, I think. Anyway, toss in the Republican deciding that food stamps were paying out too much and cutting them back, and an economy that hasn't yet bounced back (blame Obama all you want, we might disagree about that, but I'm sure we both agree that it is a great thing that wonderful people like Romney are buying out American companies and shipping the factories overseas so that they can make goods for less and hence profit more. Which I think is wonderful. Within a decade or two there won't be a single job left in this country and then we'll all get to sit around in the sun and wonder what it would be like to go shopping at WalMart or one of those other high end stores that are kept behind barbed wire fences in those foreign investment compounds) But at least nobody will ever have an abortion again, because women won't even be able to afford that. Progress comes in many forms.

If you honestly are against abortion (I would be if it were a realistic expectation), what do you think we can do for the various disadvantaged people on this planet who feel, when confronted with an unwanted pregnancy) that abortion is at least a possible option? How do we fix it so that a 14 year old minority girl who has been raised in the slums of some huge city and who has tried to do well in school but has been raped by her drunk mom's boyfriend can decide, wisely, to not have an abortion? How do we fix it so that when a ten year old girl gets pregnant thanks to her dad, choices can be made that satisfy everyone. Should we become like Nicaragua, where a woman cannot even have an abortion to save her own life? Should we start executing women who have abortions?

Life sucks for some people. Sometimes it is their own fault. Drugs, alcohol, etc. can do that to a person. Sometimes it is the fault of others, and the mother-to-be has had little, if any, say in her life. In other cases the women have little if any hope of ever getting out of poverty. The deck is way to stacked against them. And there you sit, all judgy looking, declaring that doesn't matter. But it does.

Fix it dude. You and your conservative brethren get together and figure out ways to make it possible for a pregnant woman to have choices, rather than no choice. Figure out a way to understand that poverty and hopelessness and despair are not outcomes only encountered by guys like you when you find out how good your ex-wife's lawyer is after she finds out about your mistress. Others have to live under wretched conditions their whole lives, because the people with power and money don't give a rats ass about anything in those peoples sorry lives. Except for their uteruses.

There is no consistency in your stand. You are expressing a black and white opinion, and seem unable to empathize with any set of conditions that might cause a woman to make such a decision. You don't differentiate between the careless party girl who doesn't give a rats ass about anything, babies included, and the woman living in rural West Virginia whose husband just got paralyzed in a mine accident and she already have five kids. You are just making blanket statements, patting yourself on the back for making a moral judgment call, and allowing yourself to wallow in your pride while others are suffering endlessly.

By the way, I Am Legend was a suck-ass movie. Next time you should say "Boom! Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang". It would give you some class.

Oh, and your civilized societies thingy? Virtually all the other civilized societies in the world offer universal health care. Have you any idea how many fewer women would have abortions if they knew that all health care costs were taken care of? You don't care. You want to eat your cake and have it to. And you damned sure don't want anyone else having cake. That's your frickin' cake. Damned moochers!

And how dare they do something you don't like when you go to all that trouble to hate their guts! (I'm basing that on the amount of spittle you got on your keyboard when you typed the words "blue collar".)

For the millionth time "lose" not "loose". You write "loose" for "lose" one more time, I'll smite you. It bothers me that my uneducated self can spell better than you and I'm on a phone that doesn't recognize actual words.

I'll ask it again. DrTesla, how many children have you personally adopted?

Second question: if adoption is such a universal panacea for unwanted children, why are there any children currently in orphanages or foster care?

How many of the former slaves did your great grandparents give shelter and food to when they were freed back in the 1860's? If none, does that mean we shouldn't have banned slavery?

Good try at a dodge - but the point is that YOU, NOW are opposing abortion and saying "adoption is a vaiable alternative for all those potential children".

Presumably you have adopted none - so who ARE these people who are going to do all the adopting? Orphanages are not closing down left, right and centre, foster carers are still being cried out for....so where ARE these people who are ready and willing to adopt?

Answer - they don't exist. There are not enough people who want to adopt to take the children in care NOW. You want to add significantly to that number. So talk me through it - how exactly does adoption work as an alternative to abortion?

For the millionth time "lose" not "loose". You write "loose" for "lose" one more time, I'll smite you. It bothers me that my uneducated self can spell better than you and I'm on a phone that doesn't recognize actual words.

-Nam

I'm trying real hard to come up with a snarky reply while simultaneously admitting that somewhere along the line, probably in an English class where I always barely got C's, I missed the distinction between those two words. Or I forgot. You have my wholehearted permission to smite me the next time I do this, but I plan on cheating. I'm going to have a six year old check my spelling and word usage.

For the millionth time "lose" not "loose". You write "loose" for "lose" one more time, I'll smite you. It bothers me that my uneducated self can spell better than you and I'm on a phone that doesn't recognize actual words.

-Nam

I'm trying real hard to come up with a snarky reply while simultaneously admitting that somewhere along the line, probably in an English class where I always barely got C's, I missed the distinction between those two words. Or I forgot. You have my wholehearted permission to smite me the next time I do this, but I plan on cheating. I'm going to have a six year old check my spelling and word usage.

Here, I'm gonna test myself. Lose.

Got it.

I'd thank you profusely but I don't want to damage your street cred.

I vote that congress pass a law that words should be spelled phonetically, all foreign derrivations that change a words from american english phonetic rules will now be changed. No more fillette Mignon fillay minyon.

lose is not and forever to be spelled LuzeLoose can remain loose or you could even drop the e.

I was just curious to see where he[1] draws the line. Everybody has a line they draw.

Myself, for example I draw the line electively at the point where the fetus can easily survive outside of the mothers body, and is no longer a parasitic organism. Others, draw the line at natural birth, still others at earliest medically supported viability, four to five months or so (A mistake in my opinion). Some, I suspect would like to draw the line at 214 months.

In my own case, if the life of the mother is in any of danger, then I am perfectly comfortable all the way with removing it all the way up to the point of actual birth. The life and health of a fully born human will always in my opinion outweigh that of a potential human.

In the US, at least in theory, the person who is having the operation is supposed to be the person making the final decision. In my experience that isn't always the smartest person in the room, but that's the way it is. The real truth is that there are a lot of people who make noise about reducing abortions, but when viewed through the lens of logic; their actions don't actually do that.

If the anti-choice people were truly serious about their crusade to 'save every embryo' then we'd be seeing real attempts at reduction of the need for abortion in the first place. Generally speaking that doesn't happen, which leads me to think it's a religious issue not based on critical thinking.

If the anti-choice people were truly serious about their crusade to 'save every embryo' then we'd be seeing real attempts at reduction of the need for abortion in the first place. Generally speaking that doesn't happen, which leads me to think it's a religious issue not based on critical thinking.

That's My take on it, too. It's an easy issue to misrepresent and strawman, and it's primarily an appeal to emotion. Why are they wasting precious time picketing clinics when they could be working on the socioeconomic issues that would save those precious proto-tots?

Pointing it out tends to shock them silent or make them sputter. It still stuns me how many people I talk to (mostly early 20's college students lately) that have never thought about the lack of attention they pay to pushing for better solutions BEFORE a pregnancy occurs, or why adoptions aren't skyrocketing to "save the babies". At least with the discussions I'm finding myself in now, they stop to think about it once it's pointed out to them. I tend to think of it as influencing the newest generation of voters. 'Round about 30 or so it seems that most opponents can't even hear me.

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"Tell people that there's an invisible man in the sky that created the entire universe and the majority believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure." ~George Carlin

Most doctors agree that seeing a fetal heartbeat on ultrasound means the risk of miscarriage is much lower. Confirmation of a fetal heartbeat means that the baby has passed the initial stages of development wherein the majority of first trimester miscarriages occur.

It's hard to pick a specific number for the risk of miscarriage at this point. Some cite numbers like a 4-5% risk of miscarriage at this point, but studies show a widely varying risk based on individual factors. The one thing that's safe to say, however, is that seeing the baby's heartbeat is a good sign. It means the baby is growing as it should be, and there's little reason to be concerned at this point.

Unfortunately, there is one exception to this rule. A slow fetal heart rate (less than 100 beats per minute) may signal an impending miscarriage, though this isn't true in 100% of cases.

The majority of miscarriages occur in the first trimester.

Over 80% of miscarriages occur before 12 weeks, so the chances look good for a healthy baby once you've finished the first trimester. Again, many individual factors are in play, but if 15-20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage and 80% of miscarriages occur in the first trimester, a safe estimate would be that in the general population the risk of pregnancy loss after 12 weeks is 3-4%.After 20 weeks, when a loss would be termed a stillbirth rather than a miscarriage, the risk is around 1 in 160.

What does that have to do with anything about the overall rate of pregnancy loss? Did you even read what you cut and pasted?

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When all of Cinderella's finery changed back at midnight, why didn't the shoes disappear? What's up with that?

I was going to write this last week, and then Dr.T-for-troll disappeared. Now that he is apparently back, here goes.

We used to have a visitor who was, shall we say, a very opinionated Catholic woman. She said that sexual acts should only happen between two legally married people "open to the possibility of procreation" or something to that effect. Even straight married hetero sex-- unless it ended up with sperm heading towards an egg-- was a sin. So no oral, manual or back-door fun. Unless the people could not manage it any other way because of old age or disability or something. Then it was okay-- some kind of geezer-wheelchair-show willing-godly loophole or something.[1]

She was against all abortion, of course. She did not care if the fetus had no brain development or heart at 3 months. She did not care if the fetus was formed by rape or incest. She did not care if the pregnancy was inside of a 12 year old mentally handicapped child. She did not care if an operation was medically needed to remove a fetus that had died, or to preserve the woman's chances of having a baby in the future. Of course, she did not care even if the abortion would save the woman's life. Once sperm meets egg, the woman disappears and becomes a transport vehicle for her uterus contents.

As a result of this woman's posts, I stopped sending my yearly donation check to Planned Parenthood.

Wait for it......

Instead, I signed up for them to take a larger amount each month directly from my bank account. This puts more money into their private donations fund to pay for low-income women's abortion services, since by law they are not allowed to use any government health care funds for that.

The next time I read anything ignorant, uncaring, unsubstantiated and stupid about women's reproduction here, I promise to increase that monthly amount. Dr.T-for-troll, you have been served. Boom chika wow wow.

I swear the Catholic god is a big fat sex-obsessed perv, watching people from heaven with ginormous binoculars and a huge clipboard: "Hey! Get that outta yer mouth! Oh, he's paralyzed? Well, I guess that's okay then. Giving it the old college try-- good on ya!...But wait just a me-damn minnint, yer both of youse boys! Back away from that wheelchair right now!" Catholic god talks like NJ governor Chris Christie.

To touch on a previous point (and excuse me if this has been mentioned in the long thread of posts) but there is a disconnect with believers who are against abortion by point of fact that God has designed life in such a way that most fertilised eggs/embryos are spontaneously aborted naturally. Most of these are unbeknownst to the carrier.

What this means is that God has ultimate responsibility for literally BILLIONS of aborted foetuses over time.

To touch on a previous point (and excuse me if this has been mentioned in the long thread of posts) but there is a disconnect with believers who are against abortion by point of fact that God has designed life in such a way that most fertilised eggs/embryos are spontaneously aborted naturally. Most of these are unbeknownst to the carrier.

What this means is that God has ultimate responsibility for literally BILLIONS of aborted foetuses over time.

The 75% spontaneous abortion rate seems very high-- I have read 25%. But any fetus that does not make it to birth can be laid directly at god's pearly gated door. Even elective abortion on demand by the stereotypical irresponsible drunken teenage party slut.[1] Nothing happens if god does not will it, right? How can a drunken slut circumvent an all powerful god?

That's what I told Dr. T. Instead of addressing the point about miscarriages being godly abortions, he flipped out and put the quote into his sig. So now even more people will be able to read it and think about it....

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The 'every foetus should live' crowd is, by concentrating on the already fertilized eggs, is ignoring the billions of unfertilized eggs that get flushed away every month. If life is so important that the health, mental or physical or social or familial situation, or even the age, of every woman on the planet is frickin' irrelevant, then every other woman who is not pregnant but could be is also guilty of depriving a child of life. Mrs. Duggar has proven that a below average woman can still whip out 20+ kids in a lifetime. The pro-lifers need to insist that all women capable of being pregnant, otherwise healthy or not, start doing their part for the unborn by having as many children as possible. After all, it is carrying a child to term that is that important, no any other aspect of life is, whatsoever.

People who insist that ten year old incest victims and women who will die if they try carrying their child to term have no choice, then by their logic no other woman should have a choice either. Each and every female on the planet who can be pregnant should be pregnant. That is the logical extension of the argument abortion goes put forth. Especially the most adamant of them.

And if they can say that such a stance is ridiculous, then they should be able to see that their arbitrarily drawing of the line, which is one that hurts the already living beyond reason, is just as ridiculous.

I don't think even the most rabid anti-abortion activist actually considers sperm and unfertilized eggs to be human beings,. So claiming that they should care about it in order to have a solid position in opposition to abortion comes perilously close to a strawman.

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Nullus In Verba, aka "Take nobody's word for it!" If you can't show it, then you don't know it.

My point is that if they aren't trying to argue that, then saying that they should comes very close to being a strawman, because you're presenting a position that you say they should be defending and attacking them for being 'inconsistent' when they don't defend it.

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Nullus In Verba, aka "Take nobody's word for it!" If you can't show it, then you don't know it.

As I'm wont to do, I'm throwing out a blog link that is tangentially related to the discussions at hand...but Libby Anne's How I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement has quite a bit of good data and information:

"When we landed on the moon, that was the point where god should have come up and said 'hello'. Because if you invent some creatures, put them on the blue one and they make it to the grey one, you f**king turn up and say 'well done'."